For a diverse religion with 1.4 billion followers and centuries of history, the Catholic Church left by Pope Francis has a clear identity in the West as a default protest movement in the vacuum left by the retreat of moderate “compassionate” conservatism.

Within hours of Francis’ death, the decade-long attack on his papacy was renewed. MAGA congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, flung from the far right into the centre by today’s reverse political centrifuge, posted on X: “Evil is being defeated by the hand of God.” Seriously.

Australia’s MAGA-be George Christensen wrote that Francis’ was “one of the most divisive and destructive papacies in modern history”, radically “modern” for statements such as his 2018 interview, when reportedly he said: “There is no hell; sinful souls simply disappear.” Seriously? (The Vatican later claimed the pontiff had been misquoted.)

Francis’ heresies included calling for action to save the planet; for priests to baptise the children of single mothers; for accepting the fact of homosexuality; for calling Christians “hypocrites” if they turn their backs on refugees. He supported innocent victims in Gaza and he called repeatedly for a ceasefire. As for racial inclusivity, see if the church could last five minutes without diversity. The only common ground he held with the ascendant right was his opposition to abortion. One of his last sufferings was to tolerate an Easter visit from J.D. Vance, characteristically resembling an entitled Ivy League student, bristling with ignorance and arrogance, coming back to lecture Europe for failing to follow the shining light of the MAGA faith.

The church had spent centuries fighting rationalism, but those who attack Francis as the “woke Pope” are believers in newer religion, personality cults calling for blind belief in their infallible messiahs. In December, America’s tangerine leader and his prophet Elon Musk attended the re-opening of one of Catholicism’s centres of worship – Notre-Dame de Paris – checking the time before leaving at the earliest possible moment, uncomfortable with any signs of divinity to compete with their own.

As luck had it, I was in Notre-Dame on the last day of Pope Francis’ life, pondering how the world’s Catholics were adapting.

The devout didn’t have far to look to see the world changing around them. Swirling around the solemn 10 o’clock mass was a cyclone of rubber-necking tourists showing that a phone camera knows no icon other than the selfie and that literally nowhere is sacred or safe from becoming a backdrop to an Instagram reel. Then there were the Catholic-adjacent or Catholic-curious, like myself, who came to see the reopened cathedral and hear the organ play and the Gregorian choir sing (Five stars!).

The Pope’s death brings into sharp focus the clash between organised and organic religions: between traditional institutions and the clamour of new dogmas, from consumerism to Trumpism. Popes and bishops no longer command rulers to colonise the globe or fight their protestant neighbours. Even an edifice as awe-inspiring as Notre-Dame, with €700 million of French public money given to its rebuilding after the 2019 fire, is a place where, at its centre, the humble and mournful seek solace and the underdog goes for strength.

The Easter mass message, delivered in Latin and French, was a Francis-inflected encouragement: if you look down on other people, it should only be to help them up. Simplicity and humility are the colours of the protest movement that Francis left behind. This version of religion can’t help but be political when other voices are too scared and intimidated to take up the mantle of opposition. It will long be remembered that the first public figure with the courage to speak truth to Donald Trump was a bishop, Mariann Edgar Budde, the (female, Episcopalian) Bishop of Boston.

In Australia, Anthony Albanese asked for and got a day’s pause from electioneering to pay respect to Francis. It’s easy to forget how suddenly and completely Christian sectarianism vanished from Australian life. For almost two centuries of colonised Christian Australia, sectarianism split communities, political parties, professions, families – everything. For an Italian-heritage Catholic prime minister to uncontroversially stop a campaign to mourn a pope’s death would have been unthinkable. When this changed, almost overnight around 1980, our most important division became one of our least important. It’s inspiring how quickly a society can decide to be better. We should recognise, from time to time, the ways in which the present is a vast improvement on the old days.

As religious belief has declined, fighting for relevance in a secular society has helped the churches. Sadistic and autocratic Catholic priests and nuns, having been stripped of the institutional power that protected them, have given way to individuals practising the key Christian message of humility.

Towers of power have been reduced to quiet, emotional sanctuaries. Even in Notre-Dame, bereft believers are left in peace to pray for their lost. Standing beside me, a woman begged one of France’s highest priests to bless her rosary beads. As cheery as a family grocer, he did so without a second thought. European history has been carved out of the flesh of religious wars. Priests now help the small people pick up the pieces.

My fellow-travelling atheists are quick to dismiss all this as manipulative mumbo jumbo, often with categorical judgmentalism that comes across as, for want of a better word, fundamentalist.

I don’t think you have to believe a word of the Bible, the Koran, the Torah or the Baghavad Gita to respect their potential for good in a world dominated by strongmen cults, manipulating their followers with such powerful pseudo-religious certainties that millions of committed American Christians believe they have elected a man singularly blessed from heaven. Francis was indeed divisive, if standing up for humanity against a weird personality cult is what it means. Only authoritarians see “divisive” as a dirty word.

It was reported this week that among young British people, Catholicism is more popular than Anglicanism for the first time since (presumably) the last Catholic monarchy hundreds of years ago. Pope Francis was doing something right. As a champion of the underdog, the Vatican has helped connect the developed and developing worlds, sewing immigrant communities together more harmoniously than most governments.

You don’t have to be a believer to see that traditional churches have more experience in our most pressing social issues than the manufactured belief systems that are using the very worst mumbo jumbo, inquisitions and tests of faith that modern religions have left behind.

The conclave of cardinals might now emulate art and, like Conclave the movie, elect (spoiler alert) another compassionate champion of the weak, another “woke pope”. Poor George Christensen feels this is inevitable, because Francis “stacked” the conclave “with ideological clones – men who share his vision of a ‘synodal’ Church, pluralistic, progressive and allergic to clarity. The next pope may be even worse”.

In the absence of moderate conservatism, the Vatican has been thrown into a conflict it didn’t ask for: against absolutism. Let’s hope the conclave finds a pope even worse than Francis.

Malcolm Knox is a journalist, an author and a columnist for The Sydney Morning Herald.

https://www.smh.com.au/world/europe/the-next-pope-could-be-even-worse-than-francis-let-s-hope-so-20250425-p5lu7m.html

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.

BY

PABLO CASTAÑO

There may come a time when we look back on the last decade as an anomaly in the modern history of the Catholic Church. Pope Francis — the figurehead of these years, and a radical by the standards of the Catholic hierarchy — is gone, and we are now likely to see a major shift in the political orientation of the Holy See. Ultimately, and ominously, the death of Francis could well mean that the papacy ends up finding itself aligned with the global far right.

It didn’t have to be this way. Elected in 2013, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first Latin American pope in history, brought to the Vatican a concern for social justice rooted in the radical liberation theology of his home region — along with an unprecedented focus on environmental issues and migrants’ rights. This was a dramatic shift in priorities after the conservative pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI, both of whom were more concerned with upholding traditional morality than with reviving basic Christian values of equality and fraternity.

In contrast, Francis dedicated two of his encyclicals — the highest-ranking papal declarations — to explicitly political issues. Laudato si (2015) addressed the environmental crisis, while Fratelli tutti (2020) focused on social justice. The latter famously asserted “the right of every individual to find a place that meets their basic needs” — a sign of Francis’s unwavering support for migrants against the backdrop of rising anti-immigrant sentiment in Europe and the United States. Francis was fairly open in his public disregard for far-right populist leaders like Donald Trump and his fellow Argentinian Javier Milei (Milei responded by calling Francis a “filthy leftist”).

Bergoglio’s papacy also saw a shift in the Church’s attitudes to gender and sexuality, though not nearly to the extent initially expected. His stance on sexuality was considerably more liberal than those of his predecessors — as demonstrated when he responded “Who am I to judge?” when asked about homosexuality in the Church. Francis also angered ultraconservatives when he opened the door to priests blessing “couples in irregular situations” (including same-sex couples) and surprised many by appointing women to key positions in the Vatican government. On the other hand, he upheld Catholic orthodoxy in opposing abortion rights, even in cases of rape. Shockingly, Bergoglio went so far as to call doctors who perform abortions “hitmen.”

When it came to institutional matters, Francis’s record was similarly mixed. From the outset, he aimed to bring order to a Vatican bureaucracy tarnished by the corruption scandals exposed in the “Vatileaks” revelations. He implemented a deep-dive reform of Vatican finances, resulting in the closure of 5,000 suspicious bank accounts, the creation of oversight bodies, and anti–money laundering regulations. However, another leak of compromising documents (“Vatileaks 2”) occurred under his tenure in 2015, and the release of the Panama Papers in 2016 revealed widespread Church investment in tax havens. Decades of Vatican venality would not be overturned overnight.

Yet more serious were the thousands of cases of child sexual abuse committed by priests worldwide, many of which had been deliberately covered up by John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Francis sought to end impunity for the offenders with strong measures, as demonstrated by the dismissal of US cardinal Theodore McCarrick, who was found guilty in 2019 of committing and covering up sexual assaults. Also in 2019, the Vatican held a summit on pedophilia, which established new protocols for reporting abuse. However, a mere five years later, the first report from the Commission for the Protection of Minors revealed serious deficiencies in handling complaints. Such reforms now face an uncertain future under Francis’s successor.

Away from the murky backroom dramas of the Vatican, Francis’s ascension to the papacy also marked a break with the geopolitical orientation of his predecessors, as he aligned the Holy See much more closely with the Global South. While John Paul II had been a staunch ally of Washington in the so-called fight against communism, Francis made sure to distance himself from Western governments on issues such as relations with China, Ukraine, and Palestine.

In 2018, the Holy See signed a controversial agreement with the Chinese government that led to a fierce rebuke from the first Trump administration. Later, when Russia invaded Ukraine, he called the Ukrainian president while also visiting the Russian embassy to discuss his concerns about the conflict — a gesture interpreted in the West as being overly sympathetic to Vladimir Putin. Finally, the pontiff labeled Israel’s massacres of civilians in Gaza “terrorism,” in stark contrast to the silence (or complicity) of most Western governments on the subject.

What happens next, in the wake of Francis’s death, is an open question. The conclave that elects the next pope combines religious pomp with political intrigue (a hallmark of Vatican history). When a pope dies, a sede vacante is declared, triggering the conclave process — a meeting of all vote-eligible cardinals worldwide under eighty years old, which takes place fifteen to twenty days after a pope’s death.

It is a secretive meeting in which cardinals are isolated from the outside world: they have no access to the internet and leave the Sistine Chapel only to eat and sleep at the Casa Santa Marta. The conclave lasts until one cardinal obtains two-thirds of the vote — usually requiring multiple rounds — at which point the famous fumata blanca signals the election of a new pontiff. Recent papal successions have been resolved within two or three days (two votes take place every day).

Between the pope’s death and the start of the conclave are the General Congregations, in which all cardinals discuss the Church’s state of affairs. Most of the political maneuvering to predetermine the voting outcome happens here. This meeting was key to Bergoglio’s election. As Gerard O’Connell recounts in his book on the 2013 conclave, The Election of Pope Francis, the then Archbishop of Buenos Aires gained popularity among prelates for his strong stance on financial transparency — a sensitive issue following the Vatileaks revelations.

It is difficult to predict the outcome of the forthcoming conclave. However, there are strong reasons to believe that Francis’s successor will be a more conservative pope. First, his pontificate has been highly transformative, both institutionally and in its public messaging, making it unlikely that the cardinals will choose another candidate equally inclined toward reform. The Church tends to resist radical and sustained change.

Perhaps more importantly, although the Sistine Chapel has thick walls, the Vatican is invariably influenced by global political trends. With Trump in the White House, and with the far right on the rise worldwide, electing another pope as progressive as Francis would be swimming against the tide — and the Vatican has a long history of adapting to changing realities rather than confronting them. That is why the next fumata blanca will likely announce a more conservative figure than Jorge Bergoglio. Indeed, the mood of the moment suggests that he may well be a stark antithesis to the “leftist” pope.

https://jacobin.com/2025/04/pope-francis-catholic-church-right

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.

         RABID ATHEIST.